The basic idea is that you “search for cashback deals at Live Search cashback” and if you buy, Microsoft will put an incentive payment of some percentage of the purchase price into your “cashback account” which you can withdraw in cash. What keeps it from being merely an incentive shopping site is that if you perform a regular search at Live Search, available cashback deals will be flagged with a little gold coin/dollar sign icon.

Microsoft has apparently signed up a number of major retailers and is presumably making the incentive payment out of a sales commission paid by them. The incentivized shopping model is hardly new, but what is new is that it is being associated with a legitimate search engine. While I hope participation in the program doesn’t affect the rankings of search results, the suspicion always is that by mixing search results and what are effectively paid ads, the search engine is stacking the deck. More may be known when the formal announcement is made later today.

Update: The speculation is that this is based on the technology Microsoft received last year when they acquired the Jellyfish comparison shopping site which had promised to “SHARE at least half of every $1 we earn when you shop and buy products using Jellyfish.com.” Also per the FAQ, you have to be a US resident to participate.

[...] Just like their Live Search Club , Microsoft’s Live Search cashback incentive program has drawn some "entrepreneurs" – : That’s right, $630 in cash can be yours for $714. But if you access the page through a Live Search ad link that returns 35 per cent of the purchase price, you can make up the difference. And then some. So you make a profit, and so does the seller. At the expense of Microsoft and eBay. [...]

[...] to be installed on all Hewlett-Packard consumer PCs will try to entice Google searchers over to Microsoft’s own Live Search cashback deals. From Satya Nadella’s portion of Steve Ballmer’s presentation: So the last thing I [...]

[...] press release touting the success of its Live Search cashback incentive shopping program which was announced in May. Besides the 30 percent increase in the number of product offers available plus new big name [...]